IGTV and Highlights

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Instagram is a platform packed with attention grabbing content. The type that can lead you down a digital rabbit hole and next thing you know you’ve been on there for hours. Simply clicking on ‘search’ takes us to a wall of video and intriguing stills. The algorithm puts highly viewed content at the top. Highly viewed in general, but also highly viewed by the people you follow.

You may have noticed that videos get the majority of the attention. Why is this? Because we can passively consume AND gather more information in one video post, as apposed to one photo. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and well, a video can tell a thousand more. A video has the capacity to hold your attention for longer, and attention is currency.
Just ask Gary Vee. Watch how he manages his IGTV and how he uses video in his highlights. Sure, he has a team behind him helping with this – but you will pick up some great tips on what works, and what could work for you.

IGTV

IGTV is Instagram TV, a vertical video app for longer content where most accounts can post videos of up to 10 minutes, and one hour for BIG accounts. Word on the street is there will eventually be no time limit. Bring on your Beyoncé style video/movie reels we say.

If you haven’t got IGTV, download your assets and start utilising it. Put your videos from YouTube on there. Shoot new content straight from your phone (in the vertical plane), edit on imovie, or one of the many video editing apps on the App store, and upload.

When shooting bigger production pieces like a music video, you may want to think about making one edit for youtube, and a vertically cropped edit for IGTV.For pre-existing videos on YouTube – you can run them through editing software to crop them vertically before uploading to IGTV and to your stories for a better viewer experience. It may seem like a bit of work, but you are worth the effort and you never know whose attention you could catch.

For more tips go to your favourite artists’ accounts and have a look at what they do, they are almost sure to have IGTV. For you as a fan what works well? Think about what you can take away that your fans might want to see on our page.

Highlights

These are the circles located between the bio and the posts on your profile.Highlights don’t have to be all video snippets, and as they’re essentially whatever you post to your story that you want to preserve for more than 24 hours, you can throw some tagged photos in there, your releases on Spotify (just go to your track on Spotify and select ‘Share to Instagram Stories’).

You can either set up a new highlight and select from your recent stories to add to it, or once you have posted a story, click the heart Highlight icon in the bottom right corner. To set up a highlight all you need to do is choose a cover photo and add a story name. Voila! Our favourite artist highlights belong to Muse and Will Smith, and Rihanna is fun to watch, along with Dua Lipa too.

Side note: a story can be up to 15 seconds in length. But whatever you do post will be chopped into 15 second segments.

Why should you bother with IGTV and highlights?

Because the longer you can keep someone on your page consuming content, the higher chance you have of converting them into a fan. And fans by product, they stream your music. Hell they might come to one of your shows.

And sure some fans hang out in the shadows, which actually doesn’t matter because when you have a large following, you can leverage this to your advantage. Live slots, blog promotion or a brand deal. Hey Gucci, would you like me to show off your new sunglasses to my 100k interactive followers? Great! That will be £££. See where we’re going with this?

So what have you got to lose. Get IGTV and highlights on your profile and start upping that engagement. And make sure to show us what you got! We love checking out our artists’ pages so share your music and your bodacious Instagram account with us at @spinnup.com

If you want more tips on how to boost your social media, check out guide to using hashtags on the ‘gram, or take it further and download our free Independent Artists’ Guide to Self-Promotion.

Need help getting your pics and videos to grab people’s attention? We’ve got some hot tips that might help